Percival Everett breathed fierce life into one of American literature’s iconic figures jamesrepeat huckleberry Finn Seen from the perspective of runaway slave Jim.
jamesThe pride is that Jim is secretly literate and can speak with perfect diction. The “Missouri negro” dialect that Twain “painstakingly” studied was a disguise used by Jim and other slaves to deflect white anger and suspicion. Everett was a sly writer who loved to exploit such code-switching and racial fictions to subversive comic effect.
But language is omnipotent james. Early in Jim’s journey, a slave steals a pencil for him—a crime punishable by hanging—so that Jim can “write himself into existence.”
“I can tell you that I am a man who knows his world,” James wrote in renaming himself, “a man of family, a man who loves his family, a man separated from his family, a man separated from his family. people.
James’s rebellion against a society that defined him as property extended to metaphysics. In his fever dreams he debated Voltaire and John Locke. He actually wrote it himself huckleberry FinnThe unserious final scene is a pursuit of an ending more befitting of his rage and his newly formed establishment.
FinnThe key moment is when Huck declares that he will help Jim even if it means going to hell, but Everett reminds us that Jim is already there. James told another he was “born in hell. Sold before my mother could hold me.” james This is not a thin moral fable or a boy’s adventure, but one man’s journey through the hell of America’s racial history, at times darkly funny, at other times terrifying.
